Meta Stops Crypto Wallet Novi

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With Novi, one of the last remnants of Facebook’s project to issue its own crypto coin immediately closes.

The pilot program for Novi closes in September. The program was supposed to test the possibilities for Facebook mother Meta to set up its own digital currency exchange service. The pilot has been running in Guatemala and parts of the United States since October 2021.

The Novi crypto wallet was initially built to support the Diem project. You could quickly make transactions in Facebook’s cryptocurrency with the software wallet. For the pilot, however, Novi used the Paxos stablecoin, as Diem was not ready and probably just won’t be.

Because with Novi, one of the last remnants of Meta’s money project also disappears. In June 2019, Facebook (which hadn’t renamed itself yet) announced that it wanted to release a digital currency called Libra along with several other organizations. The response to that was… not enthusiastic. Several governments criticized the project, which would turn a company notorious for its misuse of personal data into a money changer.

In the following years, the idea would be commemorated several times. The original organization fell apart when PayPal and American payment service Stripe, among others, withdrew. The project changed its name to Diem and was eventually more or less discontinued earlier this year.

Meta says in a statement to tech magazine The Verge that it is not yet done with crypto. The company has focused heavily on the metaverse in recent months, threatening the digital world with NFTs and a virtual currency nicknamed ‘Zuck Bucks’, after founder Mark Zuckerberg. However, the latter would not run on the blockchain.